Meta is reportedly developing a new search product. According to a Digiday report, three agency executives said Meta confirmed that a search product is in development, but without specific details on what the product will look like or a release timeline.

“I spoke with some friends to ask if they can confirm that they’re working on a search ad product, and they said yeah, we are planning it, but we don’t have anything to share today,” said Shamsul Chowdhury, global EVP of paid social at Jellyfish, to Digiday.

Another agency source told the publication that Meta mentioned additional innovations coming to search, though no timeline was provided. “We speculate it will be ingrained with some of their AI,” the source said.

It’s unknown what the search feature will be, but the idea of Meta developing its own search tool isn’t new. In October last year, reports suggested the company was working on an AI-powered search engine for its Meta AI chatbot, which lives inside Instagram, Facebook, Messenger, and WhatsApp. This would allow the company to generate AI-powered summaries of current events without relying on external sources. Currently, Meta AI pulls answers from Google and Microsoft Bing. A search engine would help Meta run those answers in-house, reducing its reliance on competitors’ search data.

Search improvements on Instagram may hint at what’s coming next

Agency execs say they’ve noticed Instagram search quietly improving over time. This may be an early sign that something bigger is happening under the hood.

According to Chowdhury, “Usually when a search engine gets better, that’s an indication for a platform to tell advertisers how good their search is for brands and categories, and how well they’re able to index it.”

If Meta can improve its indexing of content and deliver accurate, fast, and contextual results, it could start pitching that functionality to advertisers. That would mean new ways to target intent-based audiences across its platforms.

Sam Piliero, founder of growth agency The Moonlighters, told Digiday that Meta has talked about improving search across Facebook and Instagram using AI. In March, Meta reportedly started testing AI-powered search features inside Instagram comments. This tool surfaces related search prompts based on the content of a post. When users scroll through the comment threads, the platform suggests related searches based on what’s being discussed in the post, without users needing to exit and search manually.

Why a search engine matters to Meta’s AI ambitions

The rise of generative AI has many users turning to platforms like ChatGPT and Perplexity instead of traditional search engines. Social media platforms are also moving in this direction. Reddit is already considering becoming a “go-to search engine.” Meta is aiming to go all in on its Meta AI search function.

Piliero told Digiday that he believes Meta is approaching search from a large language model (LLM) perspective. With the volume of video, photo, and text data across its platforms, Meta has enough material to train and fine-tune powerful AI systems. Search becomes a key component of that strategy.

“If you search anything on Instagram right now, you get the little AI snippet already,” he said. “It doesn’t seem like [Mark] Zuckerberg is backing down on this at all.”

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg has made it clear the company is betting big on generative AI. On the company’s recent earnings call, he credited AI with helping drive ad performance. The company already plans to fully automate ad creative and targeting this year.

Instagram Head Adam Mosseri acknowledged on the Build Your Tribe podcast in April that search on the platform isn’t great yet. “We’re starting to invest more in search on Instagram because there’s so much amazing content,” he said. “And quite frankly, what we call content search—as opposed to searching for an account, actually searching for some type of content—it’s not very good on Instagram.”

According to Digiday, some agency leaders think Meta could start testing the product before the 2025 holiday season. Chowdhury said, “I could imagine some alpha version being rolled out to some advertisers ahead of the 2025 holiday season, because it then gives Meta a chance to take some early learnings from it and still capitalize on it during the big Q4 period.”

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